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Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

reuters.com

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Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#241

Post by Traster »

ramblerman wrote: post #204
noutella wrote: post #47

How incredibly weird is it to witness American schizophrenia* when it comes to races (and gender) from a non-american perspective. "Black+", "Latinx+", "LGBTTQQIAAP". Putting people in smaller and smaller box in the name of equality and diversity. I am the only one to feel this is coming to an absurd point ? I'm not an alt-right fan, nor would I vote Republican if I could, I'm a leftist in what's considered a traditi…

"The ideology of individualism is dependent on a denial of the past as relevant to the present… Individualism denies the significance of race." -- Robin DeAngelo Robin DeAngelo, is a frontrunner of 'white guilt', CRT, and other strange sides of the woke movement. This quote pretty much sums it up, they want to put group identity first, above individualism.

I see this criticism of CRT/wokeism etc very often and I really want to address a point about people talking past each other. Proponents of CRT don't say they want to divide people based on group characteristics, they say people are divided based on group characteristics and they recognise that whilst individualists deny what is evidently true. Essentially it's the position that people are negatively impacted due to the group they're in so they should advocate for themselves as part of that group.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#242

Post by whoooooo123 »

vmception wrote: post #153
CydeWeys wrote: post #25

The elephant in the room is the ouster of Timnit Gebru. Regardless of who you think was in the wrong there, a lot of people who left did so because they thought Google was in the wrong, and left in solidarity or maybe even because they thought they might be next for being similarly outspoken.

It would be super easy for me to not say anything for two years for a million dollars.

Did Gebru get a payout? I missed that part of the story. What are the details?

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#243

Post by rocqua »

blacktriangle wrote: post #114
rocqua wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Summarizing what you said (without agreeing) to see if I understood your point correctly. Marxism is the idea of needing class struggle for progress. Cultural Marxism is transposing that from class to culture / ethnicity. Essentially moving the dialectic from worker / captialist to privileged race / non-priviliged race? And the idea is that this is done, not to engender gradual change, but to engender revolutionary c…

Yes, I'd say that summarizes my statement well, where Marx's definition of progress is moving a society towards communism. This is why any time you see somebody talk about "the right side of history" that's a flag that said person is a Marxist, they view their desired communist end-state as inevitable.

> Yes, I'd say that summarizes my statement well, where Marx's definition of progress is moving a society towards communism.

Thanks for the explanation!

> This is why any time you see somebody talk about "the right side of history" that's a flag that said person is a Marxist, they view their desired communist end-state as inevitable.

I think that is, at best, a gross generalization. Just because that is what a Marxist might say, does not mean that everyone who says that is actually a Marxist. Besides, I believe that "history is the story of human progress" is much more a modernist theory, than a Marxist one. It seems to me that someone being "on the right side of history" could just as easily mean, being part of the progress which modernists consider inevitable. Hence making it a modernist sentiment.

Besides, when someone says "the right side of history" all that suggests to me is "back then people thought X was acceptable, now we no longer think that. Person Y was against X, and hence 'on the right side of history' ". The idea that our current morals are better than our previous morals is rather unsurprising. Most people probably hold that opinion, because otherwise, our current morals would change.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#244

Post by oblio »

dahfizz wrote: post #203
sneak wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always been dangerous to express unpopular opinions. It may be less dangerous here and now than most places in history.

This is a retort I see online a lot, and it is not a good one. When people say how its dangerous to voice opinions nowadays, they aren't using medieval Europe as a reference point (where it was also very dangerous to voice unpopular opinions). The reference point people use is their own experiences online from ~10 years ago. People used to be able to say whatever they wanted online, and now doing so is dangerous. You…

https://www.statista.com/statistics/273018/number-of-interne...

Normal people joined the internet and they want normal people things.

The internet is almost like real life now. Communication has consequences in real life, as kindergartners find out.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#245

Post by jedberg »

tester756 wrote: post #191
vmception wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> end exams are standarized and in my opinion fair there is actually a lot of ongoing discussion about that and there is no resolved consensus on your opinion

and what arguments are that this process is not fair? current approach challenges pure intellectual output, any other way implies bias which current system strongly avoids

If a standardized test said "what is the Yiddish word for rag?", is that test fair? It asks everyone the same question after all. But I'd bet you find that Jewish people were passing that test at a higher rate than anyone else.

Obviously the biases in actual standardized tests are more subtle, but a lot of the question have an inherent cultural bias and assume some basic cultural knowledge in their test takers.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#246

Post by Zababa »

tomp wrote: post #121
sokoloff wrote: post #32

> some people from underrepresented backgrounds have said they continue to feel unwelcome in the tech industry, and they also remain high in demand elsewhere as companies compete to increase diversity. This is dangerous territory to comment on perhaps, but it seems like many policies which seek to boost individual company population ratios to be significantly higher than the comparable tech-industry ratios are prone…

> We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt. We should be a bit more exact. We do not have a under representation problem in tech, but a mis representation problem. There’s a lot of minorities that are well-, even over-represented - e.g. Asians, Russian immigrants, autists, people without formal education, … I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries! But those aren’t the “right” m…

That's a good point. I think part of it (at least in tech) is due to the fact that big tech companies focused on hiring the best people from all over the world, which reduces even more the chances of local unfavored minorities. I'm from France and stories of people going to the USA to work at companies like that are common. I don't think I would feel underrepresented as a French if I worked at Google or Facebook or an equivalent. This allows the USA to do a brain drain of global talent, which helps a lot at being the best in the world. On the other hand, that means that the local people are compared against a global market, which makes things harder from them.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#247

Post by AlexandrB »

tomp wrote: post #121
sokoloff wrote: post #32

> some people from underrepresented backgrounds have said they continue to feel unwelcome in the tech industry, and they also remain high in demand elsewhere as companies compete to increase diversity. This is dangerous territory to comment on perhaps, but it seems like many policies which seek to boost individual company population ratios to be significantly higher than the comparable tech-industry ratios are prone…

> We do have a diversity problem in tech, no doubt. We should be a bit more exact. We do not have a under representation problem in tech, but a mis representation problem. There’s a lot of minorities that are well-, even over-represented - e.g. Asians, Russian immigrants, autists, people without formal education, … I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries! But those aren’t the “right” m…

> There’s a lot of minorities that are well-, even over-represented - e.g. Asians, Russian immigrants, autists, people without formal education, … I’m guessing it’s one of the most welcoming and meritocratic industries!

I don't know if there's a name for this, but as a Russian immigrant this sentence reminds me of how in Russia, because everyone is generally white, people are stereotyped by region. E.g. there are specific stereotypes for Muscovites, people from Siberia, Ukrainians (it was the USSR at the time), etc.

The point being that dividing people into arbitrary groups is a fractal process. You can zoom in on a demographic and then subdivide it again and again on various criteria until you come up with a small group of people you can call a minority. But doing so says nothing about why a sizeable demographic like PoC (30% of US population or so) is underrepresented in tech. There are certainly PoC immigrants, "autists", and people without formal education. Why aren't more of them in our "meritocratic" industry?

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#248

Post by kenjackson »

dahfizz wrote: post #203
sneak wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's always been dangerous to express unpopular opinions. It may be less dangerous here and now than most places in history.

This is a retort I see online a lot, and it is not a good one. When people say how its dangerous to voice opinions nowadays, they aren't using medieval Europe as a reference point (where it was also very dangerous to voice unpopular opinions). The reference point people use is their own experiences online from ~10 years ago. People used to be able to say whatever they wanted online, and now doing so is dangerous. You…

"it is still unequivocally true that voicing unpopular opinions online is more dangerous than it used to be."

This is because the online audience is much larger than it used to be. I could say something on usenet in 1994 and the reach was pretty limited.

To be clear, stating unpopular opinions has always been dangerous if the wrong people hear them. Now its just that they're much more likely to hear it online.

Re: Google reports soaring attrition among Black women

#250

Post by sokoloff »

kenjackson wrote: post #232
sokoloff wrote: post #32

> some people from underrepresented backgrounds have said they continue to feel unwelcome in the tech industry, and they also remain high in demand elsewhere as companies compete to increase diversity. This is dangerous territory to comment on perhaps, but it seems like many policies which seek to boost individual company population ratios to be significantly higher than the comparable tech-industry ratios are prone…

> Competing specifically for underrepresented group members with a metrics-driven goal to boost ratios at one specific company above the relevant benchmark? Not obviously good to me. This depends on other factors. For example, are there high numbers of qualified underrepresented candidates that often get no job offers and are left to leave the industry? If so, this can help absorb those qualified candidates. But if i…

I agree with your extension/modification.

I do have some doubts that there are high numbers of these cases, given how much overall excess demand there is for qualified candidates. It is surely possible and worthy of examination, though.

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